Bio: Adi Sideman is the CEO and President of Oddcast. Prior to founding Oddcast in 1999, Adi produced more than thirty online games, including HBO’s Sex and the City and The Sopranos, and Warner Brothers’ The Matrix game. In 1996, Adi produced the first animated ads on AOL.
How do you convert the fun experience a consumer creating an avatar or any other sort of interactive experience into a lasting relationship with a brand?
Our business is really a word of mouth business. In that sense, being top of mind and enabling users to become brand ambassadors is a constant goal. Achieving that top-of-mind status is something that has always driven results for brands. At Oddcast, the additional layer that goes beyond traditional word of mouth - is personalization. The idea is that once a user invests in a piece of media, a message, or a narrative, by personalizing it (with their own images from Facebook, their voice, a karaoke song or even a video through augmented reality), they are then more prone to share it because it incorporates some of their own personality and creativity. They’re then part of the narrative, which adds another connection between the experience, the brand and the end user.
We look at it as another layer of word of mouth marketing, the personalization layer. Before digital technologies, creating such experiences was impossible
What do you consider when developing an interactive campaign to ensure the participants walk away with a clear impression of the brand while not feeling marketed to?
We’re trying to strike that balance every day. Consumers want content, not advertising. And advertisers are becoming more and more aware that hitting their brand over the head of the consumer doesn’t work as well as incorporating their brand into a narrative or content that the consumer can relate to, cares about. The result is that our applications look more and more like content and less like advertising. The best campaigns are able to both enagegd a user on a narrative or entertainment level and communicate a brand message. That’s the holy-grail that we strive for every day.
Where do you see interactive marketing going in the next few years?
First of all, to say the obvious, interactive advertising is the future along with targeted messaging. Word of mouth and social will play a big role in this. Harnessing the consumers and the users in order to propagate the brand experience is the going to be the key.
If you remember in Minority Report, Tom Cruise was running through the mall and posters were addressing him by his name. That’s targeted. That’s personalized. That’s the future. It’s an experience that the potential user can identify with and also talk about.
At Oddcast we’re building the tools that allow for this type of personalization. We’re putting together the building blocks needed for constructing the future of advertising.
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